What each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude

Sunday Telegraph

A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction

Observer

Surely the definitive biography.

Harold Acton

Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience

Fiona McCarthy, The Times

It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb

Dervla Murphy, Irish Times

Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be

Country Life